Mudder (with Pictures)

I had some odd dreams last night. Of course, I can’t remember most of them. Or maybe it was just one continuous and rather disjointed dream. At one point I was with an older guy, but I can’t recall that he was particularly "old" so my dream self must have been slightly younger. He may have been an amalgamation of a few men I’ve known, as he had the authority of teacher, but longish hair. I’m thinking a combo of Rosso, Simonsen, and Anthony from Lifetouch. In one part of the dream, I even came on here and checked my notes. Sad, huh? But I read a note that was specifically a response to a comment I had left on someone’s entry and then when I come on here this morning, there is just such a note waiting for me. Not the exact same words that I dreamt, but definitely the same tone and from the same person. Weird.

For anyone tracking, we got the issue with the bank mostly figured out. We filed a fraud claim and there’s going to be an investigation. They refunded the money to us in the meantime, which means that we were actually able to buy groceries. I’m a little surprised by how well we’ve been able to scrape by this month, despite handing over $756 to the service department at Perkins for our car. We knew that would damage our ability to pay bills, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I only paid about half the Verizon bill, but it was about double what it usually is because I used it in Bermuda. If it had been a normal bill, it would have been paid in full. Other than that, all but two people got there money on time, which is good because most of our bills seem to be in the second half of the month. I called Progressive about the car insurance bill and they pushed back the due date for this month to July 1st, so I won’t get any penalties. Alan called the electric company and they gave us a 10-day grace period. So in spite of everything, we’re going to survive until the end of the month when Alan gets paid again.

Now, onto more entertaining stuff.

Sunday was the Tough Mudder Colorado at Vail-Beaver Creek Resort. It’s a ski area about 3 hours away from us, up in the Rocky Mountains. Alan and I watched it on "Bert the Conqueror" a while back and he got it into his head that he wanted to try it. So he signed up a while back. Well, him signing up somehow goaded a bunch of the guys in his office into doing it too. So the officers in the group managed to requisition a 15-passenger Army van for the trip, Captain Souza made team t-shirts, and they all went up very early Sunday morning. Charlee and I went too, at a slightly more respectable hour, and met Angelique and her daughter Sam there. Even as spectators we had to register and sign a waiver because of the full access we had to the course.

The course was about ten miles long and ranged all over the lower half of the ski slopes. There were 25 obstacles total, starting right away with a charge down the ski slope, around buildings, and over a creek. They ran up mud hills; climbed 12-foot walls; crawled through tunnels; high stepped through rope nets; low-crawled through mud under barbed wire; waded through waist deep mud spotted with boulders; crawled through tunnels that were more than half submerged in icy water; hauled logs up a black-diamond slope; jumped into pools of ice water where they had to climb walls in the middle of the pool; walk across a cargo net suspended in the air; climb a slope underneath an ever-tightening net; climb hills of snow and ice; run a mile through alternating mud trenches; climb hay bales; run down the slalom course; slide into a pool of mud; climb a greased half-pipe; go across angled monkey bars over a mud pit; and run through a field of electrically charged wires. The goal here isn’t finishing with the fastest time, but finishing at all.

There was obviously no way we could see it all because even though the obstacles would slow the guys down, they’d mostly be running between the obstacles. So we watched the start, then set off for obstacle 13, but it was straight up a long hill and we changed our minds. Hehehe. Instead we went over to the mudslide and hung out waiting for them. It took a while for them to get to us, but we had the advantage of a good view of the slalom section so we could see them coming down the hill before they got to us. I spotted a few guys in red after a while, but thought it couldn’t be them because there weren’t enough. It turned out to be Sergeants Norbeck, Schulz, and Sanchez, who had gotten separated from the others on the log-carrying section. It made me nervous seeing those three and no one else because I thought something might have happened to them. Fortunately, I spotted some more red shirts and was pretty sure one of them was Alan. After they went through, Alan asked me to go to the Electroshock Therapy section, which is right before the end, so we got down there as fast as we could to beat them to it. The obstacle was set up with wires suspended from a wooden frame over a pit of muddy water with hay bales set up as obstacles so you can’t just low-crawl through it and avoid the wires. Alan got shocked going over the first hay bale, but made it until the second, which he rolled over. He crawled the rest of the way because his legs weren’t working. LOL… watching the few groups that came through before them, that seemed to be the trend. People would get shocked, fall, then pull themselves forward with their hands because they couldn’t get their legs under them. Alan says he actually blacked out for a second because he doesn’t remember being shocked or getting to the second hay bale. Angelique let Sam go down and run with Daddy after through the finish line, and all the guys got t-shirts, headbands, free beer, and a bunch of other freebies like Cliff Bars and protein shakes.

We stayed for a little while longer. Long enough for Sgt. Schulz to decide that the chance of winning a free beer was not enough to inspire him to hurl a keg any distance. Alan, Kelby, and a couple of the others donated their muddy shoes to the event. I guess they clean them up and give them to people who need them. It’s always nice for Alan to do things like that because he wears a size 16. I doubt they get a lot of that size, and just because a person is poor, doesn’t mean they can’t have big feet. We took the shuttle down the parking lot and had to wait for Captain Migliore, then hit the road. The original plan was for us to follow the van and we would stop somewhere to get food since it was so expensive at the event. Of course, we all thought that meant a place not too far from where we were. Charlee and I were hungry and we hadn’t been running, climbing, and generally suffering for the last three hours. Kelby was riding with us and we know he was hungry, so it stands to reason that everyone else was too. I think the problem was this: the Captains didn’t want to suggest a place for fear that it would sound like an order. Since this wasn’t an Army-sanctioned event, they didn’t really have the authority anyway. The lower ranks didn’t want to make a suggestion for fear that it would come off that they were trying to overstep their bounds. The sergeants worried about both, especially since they were all different levels of sergeant. Idiots. So they didn’t stop until we were all the way to Castle Rock and then they decided that they would just go through the drive-thru, which left us on our own. Now, if we’d decidedthat in the first place, we would have stopped half an hour into the car ride.

All in all, though, it was a fun day. I took plenty of pictures. They’re already planning their costumes for next year, since Sgt. Norbeck pointed out that maybe red wasn’t a good color because the red-shirts always die. I think they should go for bright orange. Red was too popular and the orange would have been really easy to spot.

Pre-Mudder (Back row from left – Norbeck, Sanchez, Alan, Kelby, Souza. Front row – Schulz, Migliore) :

The Braveheart Charge:

 

The Mudslide:

 

Electroshock Therapy:

The Finish:

Post Mudder:

Back row – Schulz, Norbeck, Alan, Kelby

Front row – Migliore, Sanchez, and random guy I don’t know, but I think he’s a Captain.

Like I said, it was a fun day. A long day, but entertaining. I was up at 2:30 and made Alan breakfast (which I never do LOL) then couldn’t get back to sleep, and Charlee picked me up a little before 6. We got home around 5:30 and Alan was asleep on the couch by 8:15. Bonus… they got the day off on Monday for doing this. And their uniform for PT this morning included the red t-shirt and orange headband.

~Liz